Category Archives: Teaching Strategies

Take a look at this great article in The Australian Teacher Magazine (@OzTeacherMag) about education technology hits and hopes that I was lucky enough to be a part of! Click here to download the magazine on your iPhone or iPad (it’s free!). Also, be sure to follow Summer Howarth (@EduSum) on Twitter.

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Children are naturally curious, so where does it go as they grow older and what can we do, as teachers, to inspire it? Mathew Green wrote that classrooms and schools should be the most innovative, creative and, in many ways, ‘non-realistic’ places in our society. Click here to read more.

This is a great YouTube video about how Bates Middle School made a difference by incorporating the arts across all subject areas.

It is our job to foster the curiosity of our students and not squash their imaginations. So how do we do it? Take a look at the list that I have come up with to integrate art and creativity into education.

Provide the students with opportunities to demonstrate their learning as they complete the following.

Take photos of their work and annotating it (e.g. take photos of angles around the school and label them).

Drawing (e.g. draw a treasure map with directions, including a right angle, acute angle and obtuse angle).

Painting (e.g. research the layers of the rainforest and the animals that live in each layer and paint it).

Creating a comic strip (e.g. illustrate what you just read using a comic strip).

Devising a play (e.g. devise a play about a Bible story).

Writing and performing a rap (e.g. devise a rap of a multiplication table that you need to practise).

Creating and recording an advertisement (create an advertisement for a product and include its net mass and product mass).

Writing a creative story (e.g. write a story involving the planets).

Tony Ryan’s Thinkers Keys are a great resource to inspire creativity and encourage students to use their imaginations. There are 20 different keys which encourage students to think about what they are learning in different and creative ways. I use the Thinkers Keys as warm ups in many of my lessons. Click here and here for more information and resources.

The YouTube video below sums up why integrating art into education is important.

How will you integrate art and encourage creativity in your classroom?

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Every student has a learning journey, but who is in charge of that journey? When you think about a great teacher, what comes to mind? A teacher who cares, excites, motivates and inspires? What about a teacher who allows students to control their own learning?

Generally speaking, as teachers, I think we tend to want our classrooms to be neat and tidy and our lessons and teaching to be the same way. However, the quote below rings true.

Teachers usually aren’t risk takers, however our students are. Our goal should be to have our students coming to school and feeling excited about what they will discover and find out that day. We want them to be curious about where their learning will take them.

I was lucky enough to attend a professional development day with Tom Barrett who spoke about an exciting approach to learning. Click here to find out more about Tom Barrett and NoTosh. Put simply, the process begins with teachers teaching the content – immersing students into a unit of work. Think about the titles you give to the units of work. ‘Gold’, ‘Antarctica’ – sound familiar? Create a title that excites and propels the students into a state of curiosity. Once the content has been covered, the students can use their new found knowledge to explore something that interests them.

Ben Johnson has said it perfectly “ yes, there are times when direct instruction is necessary, but only to be able to do something with that knowledge or skill, but a great teacher devises learning experiences that force all the students to be engaged much like being in the deep end of the swimming pool.”

Once the content has been covered, the focus shifts to what the students can do with that knowledge. Students jump into the driver’s seat and complete tasks in order to discover what they want to do with their knowledge and devise their own questions. Tom Barrett provided ideas for students to become problem finders, as opposed to problem solvers, such as encouraging students to devise questions beginning with ‘how might we…’. Once a specific question is chosen, ideas are generated by the students in small groups in an activity called ‘100 ideas in 10 minutes’ – which is exactly as the title suggests. The students then research and/or create according to their question and ideas. Click here and here for more activities and information.

Who knows what the students will come up with? Whatever it is that they want to do with their knowledge – it will be authentic. Learning is doing and true learning takes place when the students are interested, excited and in control.

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On Thursday 8th August, I was lucky enough to attend a seminar conducted by Jill Eggleton. She was incredibly inspiring and spoke about lighting the literacy fire. In this blog post I hope to share some of the knowledge and ideas that were presented about shared reading and guided reading. Hopefully, you will feel as inspired as I do!

As teachers we need to ask ourselves what we are doing that is not essential. We must eliminate these so that the necessary can shine.

The biggest challenge of all is to create a love of reading in our students – not just school time readers, but life time readers. I love sharing this quote with my students from J.K. Rowling - “if you don’t like to read you haven’t found the right book.”

Jill really emphasised that children need to understand what they are reading. For example, we can’t assume that they are visualising as they are reading.

If students are not reading the punctuation, then they are not understanding the text.

We need to be extending and enriching the students’ vocabulary. As they read, perhaps they could add words to a book or a Google Doc under specific headings. For example adjectives, adverbs etc.

We need to cater to each child’s individual needs and encourage them to read for enjoyment.

Our aim should be that once we finish reading a book to our students, the words dance in their minds. When we read a book to our students, we should read it in one go, not stop and pull the book apart as we go. The students will lose interest and lose the magic of the story.

Novelsshould not be used for guided reading.

Teachers need to be asking high order questions as opposed to low order questions.

Who asks most of the questions in class, the teacher or the students? If it is the teacher, then isn’t the teacher doing most of the thinking?

If you have fluent readers in your class, then you must dig deeper.

Broad Question Types

The answer is in the text or illustration.

The answer is not in the text or illustration, the reader uses background knowledge.

The answer is in the text or illustration but the reader needs to think and search.

Higher Order Questions

Do you think the plan will work?Why/justify your answer.

What do you know about the character? How?

What do you think might happen next?

What picture do you get in your head?

What questions could you ask the character?

How did you feel, why?

What do you think she/he has learnt?

Were your predictions correct, why/why not?

Can you see any adjectives, adverbs…?

What other books have you read that have been about (insert topic)?

Activity to follow: students write a story about (insert topic).

Comprehension Strategies (each strategy should be covered throughout a guided reading program).

Predict

Justify predictions

Make inferences

Ask questions

Make connections (text to self, text to text, text to world)

Visualise

Summarise

Give an opinion

Justify opinion

Clarify vocabulary

Main idea

Author’s purpose and point of view

Skim and scan

Compare and contrast

Analyse and synthesise

Evaluate ideas and information

Find evidence to support thinking

It is essential that the right types of resources are used. The books need to allow the students to dig deeper – they must sound good. Providing our students with the skills to learn is more important than providing them with knowledge. I love this quote Jill shared – “we too often give students cut flowers when they need to grow their own plants”. There is so much research supporting reciprocal reading. Click here and here for great resources from Jill Eggleton.

I will leave you with more wise words from Jill. “We need to motivate our students to learn. We should read aloud to them every day – being read to should be like eating a delicious chocolate”. Click here and here for online stories to read to your class.

Click here for more information about Jill Eggleton and her resources. Listen to Jill herself in the great YouTube clips below.

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Purpose: the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.

I came across this website and it spoke about having purpose in life. Having a purpose in life is important. The website explained that purpose helps us to be happy and fulfilled. Without purpose life doesn’t have a focal point and the end product is an average life and an average existence.

The article described people who are in tune with their purpose as people who truly feel like they are alive and when they talk, they make everything seem so exciting and interesting. On the other hand, people who do not have a purpose are often negative, complain and feel unsatisfied and uninspired. The website listed the following five benefits that may be felt when you have a purpose in life.

Meaning and fulfillment

Unlimited flow of drive and passion

Instant focus and direction

Freedom from things that do not matter

Success

Isn’t this what we want our students to feel when they are learning?

Teachers need to know why they are teaching what they are teaching and students need to know what they are learning and why they are learning about it.

Take a look at the following YouTube clip that further explains why knowing ‘why’ is important(I was shown this video on a professional development day at the beginning of the term).

If teachers constantly ask ‘why?’when creating lessons, and think about the purpose of each lesson, the lesson will be meaningful. Teachers will be passionate about what they are teaching, they will focus on a specific direction they want the students to move to, disregard things that aren’t important and be successful.

Teachers often assume that the students know the purpose is regarding what they are learning but that isn’t always the case. If you asked your students why they are learning what they are learning, what would they say? “The teacher told me to”? If students know why they are learning what they are learning and have a say in what they can learn more about, their learning will be meaningful, they will be fulfilled, they will be motivated, have direction, discard the things that don’t matter and learn.

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I came across this great blog post about ‘student shout outs’. The post was about encouraging students to share positive statements or compliments in an anonymous way. It inspired me to create a compliment wall for my class. I provided the students with a card with a student name on the top. The students were instructed to silently write an anonymous compliment about that person. Once they had written a compliment, they were to put their hand in the air and I would take their card and give them another. This process was repeated until each card had a number of compliments.

It was great to see the students writing positive things about students they may not be close friends with and it was even better to see their faces when they read the compliments on their card. Each day we pass the bulletin board several times and it reminds the students to make others smile and read positive things about themselves.

I now ask the students to share how they made someone smile each day. It’s so important to promote a positive environment where the students encourage and support each other.

How do you promote a positive environment in your classroom?

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Teachers Pay Teachers is such a great site! It allows teachers and educators to upload resources they have made and sell them to teachers. I have found so many great resources that I have been able to easily implement in my classroom. Rachel Lynette is one of the stores on TpT that I love. She has created fantastic resources that are incredibly useful, particularly her task cards. They are sets of cards that are ready to be printed, cut out and laminated and come in all kinds of topics. Here are a few examples of how I have been using the task cards in my classroom.

1. Guided Reading

As I hear a group of students read each day during guided reading, we focus on a particular reading/comprehension strategy, e.g. author’s purpose, main idea, inferring visualising, predicting etc .

Using the text the students are reading, we discuss the strategy.

To conclude the session I read out a couple of the task cards pertaining to the strategy and the students practise the strategy.

This is the students’ favourite part of the session.

2. English – Text Types

During term 1, the students have been learning about persuasive texts.

Persuasive texts require cause and effect relationships

Once the students had gained a good understanding of cause and effect relationships, I introduced the cause and effect task cards as a warm up.

I read out the task card and I selected students to identify the cause and effect.

They then worked in their table groups to come up with a sentence using cause and effect words to put the cause and effect together. The students get very excited and try to use different cause and effect words each time.

Click here for the cause and effect poster I handed out to each table group (it looks good when printed on coloured paper and laminated).

3. Spelling

I have some students who are struggling to learn their spelling words each week.

One guided reading group uses the spelling task cards to practise their spelling words.

The task cards provide a variety of interesting activities that the students can choose from.

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My name is Ashley Azzopardi. I am a primary school teacher and eLearning coordinator in Sydney, Australia. I have taught Year Five and I currently teach Year Two. I love my job and I'm always striving to be the best teacher that I can be. Thank you for dropping by and I hope you enjoy my blog! Your comments are very welcome and appreciated!